The changing face of the world has affected the education and research of language skills. The long-discussed listening skill has changed as well by incorporating and directing listening development outside the classroom by virtue of technological aids besides the intensive instruction of listening in the classrooms in the form of skills and strategy training. Therefore, a reappraisal of listening skill was needed and is shown by reviewing the historical journey of listening instruction and digital aids in reorganizing the instruction of listening inside and outside the classroom. A small-scale personal and professional theory of listening instruction and future research trajectories for listening researchers were concocted.
TopIntroduction
The current view of four foundational language skills has been gravely affected by four incidences; the downfall of conventional grand methods, increasing focus on both top-down and bottom-up skills, the integration and contextualization of those skills, and the changing knowledge regarding English language and listening skill (Hinkel, 2006). To start with the historical narrative of listening, as more than 45% of the whole conversation takes place to listen outside the instructional settings, which is more than the time of speaking (30%), reading (16%) and writing (9%) (Feyten, 1991), Brown (2007) claims listening to be the most effective medium of learning at the early stages of schooling. In the case of foreign language education, the intensive instruction of listening had been laden with lexical, structural, and interactional trainings in the audio-lingual period in the form of “listening to repeat” (Vandergrift, 2004). Later, listening perception was deemed as a goal per se rather than as a vehicle to another destination in the 1980s which is the time of comprehension and natural approaches (Gilman & Moody, 1984). Then, it was appraised again with the advent of Communicative Language Teaching approach which conceptualized listening in three underpinnings; the discrepancy of written and spoken language, diverse forms of authentic materials, and contextualization of instruction (Brown, 1987, quoted from Goh, 2008). In addition, since university entrance exams, exit exams, other forms of tests usually incorporate a listening section as a basic constituent of foreign language proficiency (Richards, 2008), listening skill is still being highlighted by the practitioners in the studies of modern times on the basis of the fact that a language area that is not tested would ignite teachers to underestimate it.
Out of the four main skills, listening and reading are two perceptive skills with a number of commonalities due to their receptive nature based on decoding and comprehension, using linguistic and world knowledge to perceive the input which requires top-down and bottom-up skills, utilizing cognitive processes that are resilient and mutable to have a mental image in the memory, not to mention other influencing factors on both skills as metacognitive strategies and motivation. Contrary to the common features of those receptive skills, listening, one of the most fundamental receptive macro-skills (Richards, 2005), can be characterized as quite a unique, arduous, and intricate skill in that it involves distinctive prosodic features as sounds, stress, and intonation, occurring in an on-line and transient time which makes listening out of control due to the pace of speech, its variability, word boundaries’ being blurry, not having the chance to go back or forth in a speech, disorganized register teeming with hesitations, pseudo starts, corrections, reduced forms, redundant lexis, repetition, restatements, fillers, pauses, etc., and lastly being a contextual and social skill embodying coded cues (Field, 2003; Lynch & Mendelsohn, 2010; Mendelsohn, 2006; Renandya & Farrell, 2010; Richards, 2008; Vandergrift, 2006).